Thursday, 9 January 2014

Amir Chasson treats the art critic of the Evening Standard’s
lacerating comment about his paintings at the Saatchi Gallery as a triumph.
‘When I knew I was going to be in that Saatchi exhibition, I assumed Brian Sewell
would review it and I was worried I wouldn’t be mentioned. He said that my work
looked like a Sunday painter’s, an amateur from Ponder’s End. That was great. I
didn’t get enough bad reviews. Sewell giving me a bad review is a great
accolade. A lot of artists don’t get reviews good or bad, none at all.
Indifference is what’s painful. No reaction is what hurts. A bad review is as
good as a good review.’ Chasson’s response to such a potentially demoralising comment
in print is surprising and almost incredible but he is defiant, translating
adversity into advantage, displaying some of Andy Warhol’s inverted logic.

What riled Sewell are Chasson’s imaginary portraits
resembling caricatures or cartoons. Exhibited in a show called ‘New Order:
British Art Today’, Chasson aligns these exaggerated faces beside diagrams of
indeterminate graphs, maps and bar charts. Eyes are lopsided and noses curve
out of perspective. They begin to resemble those Victorian heads illustrating
the science of phrenology that attempted to reveal intelligence or degeneracy in
the shape of a skull. These faces are discomforting in their collapsing details.
The simulated diagrams allude to rationality but are paradoxical fictions
awkwardly meeting in paint. Chasson seems drawn to that friction between our
faith in concrete information and the subjectivity of both making and looking
at a painting.

Chasson greets me at his studio in a building run by Acme,
offering warm and affordable space to artists, so different from the romantic
myth of ramshackle attics. The studio is
surprisingly tidy even though he shares it with another artist. Large canvases
from past exhibitions are rolled up inside tubes and several unfinished
paintings are hung along the walls. Wearing a pair of modish glasses he has the
appearance of an educated, urban professional. He is on a roll now, on the cusp
of wider recognition and new opportunities, positioned where every ‘emerging’
artist wants to be, showing work in exhibitions, being reviewed and finding
recognition.

Chasson remembers the process of entering the notorious
Saatchi Collection as rather impersonal and never discussed the sale with his influential
patron. The ICA, then hosting ‘New Contemporaries’, simply called him and said
‘off the record’ that ‘Charles’ was interested in buying the paintings and
would he mind? Being bought and exhibited by Britain’s leading collector of
contemporary art, Charles Saatchi, might represent a defining moment in an
artist’s career. Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin are proof of that. Amir Chasson demurs
but concedes that it’s helpful in getting noticed and reviewed. ‘I don’t know
how valuable it is. My initial response was, oh great, I’m going to make some
money from that show. I didn’t even know he would show the pictures. I swear I
didn’t even look at the Saatchi website. You don’t do that as an artist, you
just don’t. You have to keep thinking about the next painting. You can’t keep
thinking about what you did before. Your reference points are your friends and
colleagues, people you studied with, those you look up to.’ He seems grounded
enough not to get carried away by this lucky break, but confesses ambivalence
about the process. ‘Sometimes I get this feeling it’s not prestigious anymore
to be in the Saatchi, but of course I would be happy to sell more paintings to
him.’

This begs the question how comfortable he is with success
and what really drives him. He offers that ‘it’s very hard being an artist in
London,’ which seems a truism and I press him to elaborate. Does he mean
financially, professionally?‘Yes, of
course, all of that. Financially, you can deal with it by freelancing, sharing
a studio, by working from home. The greatest difficulty is the intellectual, psychological
challenge of who am I in this crazy, insane, saturated, money-driven world. All
the other things, health, money, wellbeing comes later, if at all. Because when
you make artwork, all that goes out of the window, none of that matters. When you are in the ‘zone’, finally in the
studio and have ideas and are executing them, then it’s a high, a sort of
happiness, it’s where you need to be like being in the womb.’

He talks with animated conviction while his hands appear still
and controlled.

After many years working as a graphic designer and teacher in Tel Aviv, he seems to have found his direction and a professional integrity
by his mid-40s . Compelled to take an MA in design by the college that employed him, he
researched Hebrew typography by distributing questionnaires in the street.
Surely, it had a practical application for communications? ‘I hated every
minute of it and decided it was pointless but somehow they liked it. It was the
equivalent of why English readers might prefer the fonts, Times New Roman or
Helvetica.’

Chasson is a curious iconoclast, teasing established
orthodoxies from masculinity to the art world itself. He recounts persistent alterations
of any commercial brief or syllabus. ‘I
have always had a subversive streak like Marcel Duchamp, one of my heroes at school
like many artists nowadays. I was always attracted to how he makes fun of
science and makes science ridicule itself.’ In early, animated films, made in
Israel, which he now calls ‘a bit silly’, he took risks by satirising military
heroes or putting Arab lettering over posters celebrating the anniversary of
Israeli independence. Even more provocative was the use of Palestinian
propaganda. ‘Guy, my partner and a journalist, used to travel to the West Bank and
bring back little postcards that showed ‘shaheeds’ or heroes, which will
probably be shocking for some Israelis. They did some horrible things obviously
like exploding themselves on buses. But that’s an example of the source
material I was using.’ Machismo remains an enduring interest. During his
residency in Rome, he made a very large painting merging images of a heavy marble
head in the Capitoline museum with muscular actors posing as gladiators outside
the Colosseum and young Romans sweating inside Goth clothing on the street.

But how did his finally find his groove and ideas that could
engage him? He credits his testing training at Goldsmith’s College, which
helped him find a subject and a method, despite his initial fears that the
course was too pretentious and reliant on theory. On this point he is emphatic.
‘It was amazing. Studying there put everything in context. I know it sounds
ridiculous. But there’s no way you can become an artist without going through an
education. Painting at Goldsmiths, the year I was there, was a no-go zone. To
use a politically incorrect term, it was ‘retarded’.’ So there was no respect
for your roots in drawing or what he wanted to do? ‘I loved being there with
all my heart but the approach was to tear down all you knew and build you up by
starting again. When I started I was 39 but most were in their twenties. I
needed to be more stubborn. Then some drawings got accepted by the Jerwood
Prize and Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2009, which was the biggest ‘fuck
you’.I had made a massive drawing called
‘Piss Pants’, a figure with a big stain on a pair of jeans. I was thinking
about when people actually piss themselves, when they’re drunk or scared. The
tutors gave me an ‘unsatisfactory’ grade. That was good, it pushed me and I
started making videos. I resisted but they pushed me really hard and it
worked.’

How Chasson arrived at making the Saatchi series illustrates
the role of chance that characterises any artistic career. Having tried to
isolate single words like ‘sameness’ or ‘prolix’ he kept running into the
challenge of making a painting that held the viewer’s interest. ‘I thought that
people are really indifferent to those words, nobody cares or gets it. Then I
realised one of the most attractive things for people that makes them stop is a
portrait. The human face is like the colour red, it gets your attention. I
thought that’s a great tool for waving the cheese in front of the mouse. I had
never painted a portrait before. Then I heard the name ‘Ipswich’ on the radio
and not being from this country it sounded ridiculous and I copied a Picasso
pencil portrait, as I wasn’t confident enough to work from life. It’s a big
responsibility to work with a live model. I put the word Ipswich around it and
I knew immediately that it was working. ‘

Later, he would use the same strategy of sampling found
images, attributing the portraits to ‘composites like police software faces. I
go through magazines or online images. One of the Saatchi paintings has the
hair of a pop star, the shirt of a rugby player and one has the face of an
Ingres woman. There’s no real balance. God forbid it’s balanced. The dissonance
is what I’m after.’To heighten the
alienating effect of these portraits he often introduces the hint of a skin
condition. More recently, in a large installation he painted a fictional group
of oil and gas executives, suggested by corporate prospectuses of large
multinationals.‘Corporate people
sometimes look crazy – it’s more intense because it’s not normal for them to be
in front of the camera, they are usually behind the scenes. They are putting
themselves out there.’

This unconventional streak still persists in the artist’s
attitude to the art market, which he describes as having become an industry. He
shows me a limited edition he made for an exhibition in Norwich made from a cereal
packet which unfurls, like a crack in a door, to reveal a middle aged man turning
around to admire the back and buttocks of an anonymous, naked man. I glance at
the price and see ‘£299’ which seems reasonable. I squint again at the small
print and see that each piece actually sold for £2.99 despite the gallery’s
misgivings that art was almost being given away for free. Ever the maverick, Chasson
insisted that this witty collaging of found material should sell at the cost
price of the original cereal on a supermarket shelf.

He makes several references to critical theorists like
Derrida and Baudrillard as sources of inspiration but acknowledges that he
doesn’t take them too seriously, merely using them as starting points for ideas
that he incorporates into artworks.Does
the viewer also need the same kind of education in theory to understand much of
contemporary art? ‘No, not necessarily, if the work needs theory from outset
then there’s a problem. But if it succeeds then an artwork can sit on a pile of
theory without there being a problem. Peter Doig makes good eye candy, it’s
great but if you discover there are ideas behind it, what’s wrong with that? The
Desmoisselles d’Avignon by Picasso is so brilliant because his process was so
random. Most art arrives out of random processes. This is what artists are
supposed to do. Picasso creates a picture like a poster, addressing life, death
and sex and he needs ambiguity otherwise it becomes like propaganda. Popular
culture doesn’t have ambiguity. That’s why I failed as a commercial artist.
You’re supposed to feed people a message.’

Possibly breaking the conventions on good journalism, I ask
if I could buy a painting. I point enthusiastically to his latest project, an unfinished
double panel painting on which the word ‘Gene’ is spelled out in a confectionary
colours and bubbles. Gene Clark from the Byrds is placed inexplicably opposite a
dinner party hosted by the German revolutionary, Rosa Luxembourg. Chasson
starts to shift in his seat and look uneasy for the first time. He doesn’t want
to disappoint me. ‘Right now, I need it for some new exhibition proposals. I
will keep you in mind.’ I’ve introduced the subject of value into Chasson’s sanctuary,
the place where he finds his ‘zone’. Gradually the tension dispels as he shows
me other examples of his work in the studio. If paintings don’t sell, he will
simply paint over it. Again, it seems rather defiant and practical at the same
time.

Before I leave, he offers me shortbread from an unopened
packet on the table. ‘I bought it especially for you,’ he says with a smile as
I hold the cellophane wrap and feel the sticks inside. I hesitate as I explain that
I’ve given up eating wheat but relent to avoid appearing faddish or churlish.
Tentatively, I snap off a piece to nibble. He smiles solicitously, eager that I
should enjoy myself. I feel naughty breaking the discipline of my diet but fully
appreciate the sweet, buttery biscuit. Amir Chasson seems to make breaking
rules rewarding and even necessary.

'New Order: British Art Today' runs until January 16, 2014 at the Saatchi Gallery, London.

About Me

I am a London-based lecturer and writer specialising in Modern and Contemporary art. I teach at Christie's Education, Sotheby's Institute and work freelance at the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. I am also a reviewer for Flash Art magazine.This blog is a place to comment on art and visual culture in London and abroad. I Tweet @Joshuaswhite and Five Senses can be found at http://joshuasimonwhite.blogspot.co.uk

For any publishing projects or media appearances, I can be reached at joshua@joshuaswhite.com. Formerly, I was a founding editor of Metrobeat (now Citysearch), New York, the first listings guide to the city and subsequently the launch producer of the BBC Online homepage.